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An Express Without Any Delays

The first thing to be said about “60x60 Dance” is that it is a masterpiece of organization. The idea — 60 new dance pieces are performed to 60 new pieces of music, each lasting no more than 60 seconds — is quite mad. But it’s this kind of madness that makes the cultural world go round, and so our thanks are due to the composer Robert Voisey, who first came up with the concept in 2003. He has apparently staged more than 100 “60x60” performances since then, and on Friday he and the choreographer Jeramy Zimmerman added two more in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center.

Two large clocks, on either side of the stage, provided checkpoints as each minute passed at the afternoon show, and to the credit of all concerned the timing was as tight as a German train schedule.

Photo

60x60 Dance: A short-order dance menu was served twice at the World Financial Centers Winter Garden.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

As the dancers and their music unspooled through a seamless hour, there were frequent cheers from the large crowd packed into rows of chairs and on the broad flight of stairs at the other end of the hall. (The people descending the escalators also provided a mobile audience and a source of theater as they tried to comprehend exactly what was going on during their lunch hour.)

The choreography was far less compelling. Making work that’s interesting to watch for a minute sounds easy, but it doesn’t allow much time to convey a style, an aesthetic, an atmosphere. Surprisingly few dances felt like stand-alone possibilities. Exceptions were Erin Jennings’s fluid trio, “Shelly (The Red-Eared Slider),” to music by Dan Sedgwick and Marji Gere, and Germaul Barnes’s muscular male duo, “Broken Spaces,” to a score by Nicholas Chase.

Some choreographers, perhaps wisely, didn’t even attempt a coherent piece. In a blatant crib of Jérôme Bel’s “Shirtology” — or sheer coincidence — Jason Dietz Marchant removed one T-shirt after another for 55 seconds, then coyly left the final one on. And in Rachel Wynne’s “Plastic Edge ver2,” to Junya Oikawa’s score, Alicia Walshe stood dead still for a minute, eventually smiling at the audience in a Pina Bausch-like complicitous way.

In the end “60x60” provided a lesson in perception; it’s astonishing how elastic a minute can be. Some of these pieces were over by the time you had checked a name in the program; others seemed to drag on well beyond their allotted time. But they didn’t. The clocks told us so.